The advent and stunning growth in popularity of “smart” mobile phones, mobile tablet computers and similar devices has led in turn to the development of hundreds of thousands of “apps,” shorthand for software applications, that users may have preinstalled on their mobile devices or which users may selectively download to their devices from an internet “store” or other remote location. Many such apps perform highly targeted, specific tasks beneficial to the user. This mobile technology has, among other things, offered users the opportunity to conduct myriad business and personal activities in a timely fashion while “on the go.”
Some apps are wholly resident on the user's device, but often the most useful are those that involve a user interface resident on the mobile device for enabling the local performance of certain functions as well as communication over the internet (or via cell phone systems) to other such devices and to remote computer services where, among other things, information is stored (often in relational database management systems), selectively retrieved and processor intensive activities, difficult computations and other complex functions, such as voice recognition and response, e.g. Apple's Siri program, are individually performed for thousands, even millions, of people, so-called “cloud computing.” Companies, such as Akamai, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, operate enormous cloud computing facilities in diverse locations with high levels of redundancy and security to provide reliable and private computer services for individuals and businesses, small and large, simple and complex. The combination of mobile phones, mobile tablet computers and the like with apps and cloud computing centers has created a highly customizable platform that has led to a burst of innovation, but much remains to be done to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by these technologies.
Cloud computing has allowed owners of multiple phones, tablets and computers to centralize their data so that it is concurrently and equally available on all of the user's devices, while enabling the off-loading of complex software, microprocessor intensive computations, data analysis and other demanding computer tasks and vast information storage requirements from individual devices to the cloud. With cloud computing, selectively sharing of information with any number of third-parties has also become more convenient and far more prevalent, the well-known Google docs and Google sites applications being familiar examples of ways of creating, storing and selectively sharing a wide range of information with others. There are many other familiar examples of the creating and sharing of information via the internet including the so-called “social applications,” such as Facebook and Google+, that enable users to connect to their “friends” and share information with them.
While social and many other apps, particularly mobile versions, have become extremely popular and highly useful, they still suffer many shortcomings. For example, the familiar social networks are centered on people talking about themselves and personal relationships, that is, “friends,” what friends “like,” what friends are doing and so on. Users of social apps may receive unsolicited invitations to “friend” people that are mere acquaintances or less. Many “friends” post banal or inane activities focused on themselves, or matters of interest to only a few within their circle of friends, yet all such posts are typically made equally available to all “friends,” whether the information is wanted or not. A recent study of social media by the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project supports these conclusions. See Rainie et al., “Coming and Going on Facebook,” Pew Research Internet Project (Feb. 5, 2013) available at http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/02/05/coming-and-going-on-facebook/.
Not all “friends” are equal in stature, nor are all “friend” associations of a similar kind; family relationships are far different than neighborhood friends, bike club, business, hobby or rotary club “friends,” and so on. In short, irrelevant information and too much information, that is, information overload, are common problems with such social networks, particularly when sharing is on matters of fleeting, trivial or no interest to most of one's “friends,” plus friends change over time for many reasons.
The social network “friend” model fails to recognize that there are many important and highly useful interactions between individuals who are not “friends” in the traditional sense and, indeed, who may not even know one another. Common affinities of various kinds create different, but significant interpersonal bonds or relationships, like stamp collecting, piloting aircraft, college fraternity alumni groups and endless more. Further, in the social network “friend” model, as the number of “friends” increases, the number and complexity of a person's relationships grows geometrically. Facebook allows users to have up to 5000 friends. This has mind boggling implications since a group of five people has a total of 10 bilateral relationships between its members; a group of 20 has 190; and a group of 50 has 1,225. This has led evolutionary anthropologists to posit 150 people as the upper limit of “friends” for human beings, the so-called “Dunbar Number,” named after framed primatologist and evolutionary psychologist, Robin Dunbar. Friend based social networks are struggling, so far with little success, to cope with these realities. See Bennett, “The Dunbar Number, From the Guru of Social Networks,” Bloomberg Businessweek (Jan. 10, 2013) available at http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/90538-the-dunbar-number-from-the-guru-of-social-networks
The social network business model (and that of many other internet companies) is to offer free services while covertly gathering and utilizing personal information of individual users, including even their location at the moment, to direct commercial advertising to them, often whether they wish it or not. Profiles of individuals, their interests, etc. are constructed by intercepting and aggregating the user's personal information obtained from the user's interaction with the company's often free internet services. Such collection and commercial use of personal information has created substantial controversy and prompted legislative efforts to curb such use and protect individual privacy. There is an inherent tension between the business model of the “friend” based social networks, and the desires of their members or users.
This inherent tension likewise exists between users and many other internet business models. For example, Google, and other search engines, offer free search and other free or low cost internet services, which are supported by advertising income. Google relies on user search requests as a proxy for what advertising the user might find of interest, although many searches are not motivated by discovering something to purchase. Over time, ever more detailed profiles of individuals are constructed and stored in an attempt to target advertising more effectively, but there is no telling how this personal information ultimately may be used or disclosed to the detriment of the individual. Paid advertisements are displayed with each search request, whether wanted or not, and often prioritized by which advertiser pays the most, rather than by a user interest criteria. In some search models, the search results even include paid ads as prioritized search responses.
Countless other web businesses also rely on gathering, storing and utilizing personal information of users to advance their commercial or other goals. Not surprisingly, such advertising models are also typically inefficient as often only a low percentage of people doing searches or taking other actions actually clicks on the displayed ads, and even fewer follow through with purchases. The inefficiency is overcome by the low cost of delivering ads, but the invasion of privacy and the intrusiveness to many, to reach a few actual customers, remains.
Current internet business models are also relatively inefficient in providing prospective customers purchase price discounts and in reaching individuals most likely to respond to such discounts with a purchase. Businesses often rely on offering “discounts” to incentivize purchases or to serve as “loss leaders” prompting increased customer traffic that hopefully leads to the sale of profitable goods or services.
Groupon, currently the most popular of the internet electronic discount coupon models, exemplifies such inefficiencies. Groupon offers “deal of the day” discounts on goods and services in the many local markets it serves. Groupon typically telephones local merchants (an expensive practice) to solicit their interest in offering discounts, insisting that the merchant offer prospective customers deep discounts and on substantial quantities of goods or services to make it worthwhile for Groupon to get involved, and requiring that the merchant typically share with Groupon 50% of the discounted sale amount. Thus, a $100 item may be discounted to $50, which the merchant splits equally with Groupon thereby leaving the merchant with $25, a large loss on each sale that can only be recouped if the discounts lead to the development of a broad and loyal customer base at normal pricing. However, as many merchants have publicly reported, the deep discounts frequently result in one time purchases and a devaluation of the merchant's products or services in the eyes of existing customers.
Intermediaries such as Groupon make discount advertising very expensive and relatively inflexible for local merchants. Groupon needs significant lead time for offers and blasts its discount of the day emails in blunderbuss fashion to its broad email list for the relevant geographic area. Recipients often take advantage of the deep discount without becoming loyal repeat customers, which is counterproductive for the merchant. The Groupon model is also not flexible enough to enable, for example, a small restaurant to offer on a Sunday a discount for a Monday evening dinner to the first 20 persons who accept the offer, thereby to potentially fill the restaurant on an otherwise slow evening. The reader will recognize countless other examples where easy to execute, short lead time advertising (that can be quickly changed or discontinued, limited to certain days, hours or numbers of people and so on) serves the interests of the merchant, but is inconsistent with the business models of companies such as Groupon. There is an unmet need for an internet discount model that eliminates expensive intermediaries, enables last minute discounts to be offered and enables the merchants themselves to quickly and easily tailor special deals or discounts to align with their best interests and to reach their desired target audiences far more effectively and far less intrusively than current technologies permit.
There is also an unmet need for more efficient internet based “customer loyalty” and other programs that assist businesses in building loyal and repeat customers. For example, rather than give big discounts to attract new customers, it is often more effective for merchants to grant recurring discounts or the like to existing, repeat customers to reward them for their loyalty and to incentivize their continued loyalty. The major airlines have had success with loyalty programs that reward “frequent flyers” with free flights, but there is presently no satisfactory, low cost way, particularly for small local businesses, to provide internet based loyalty programs that are easy to create and administer, and are effective without being intrusive.
In those apps designed for business use or personal use (e.g., to aid in keeping one organized or the like), the input of information and its transmittal to the appropriate person or group, and its later retrieval as a coherent whole is often cumbersome and inconvenient, particularly where many communications and various attachments may be involved. The popular email programs have this deficiency. Also, many apps have become so targeted that users must jump from one app to another to handle the everyday “business of life,” particularly for a person on the go who is engaged in purposeful activity. For example, there are apps for reminders, tasks, notes, calendars, messages (chat, phone, etc.), photos, videos, financial records (e.g., billing invoices and expense records), contacts and so on. The user may have to jump from app to app to utilize the respective functions of each app, even though the user is really dealing with different constituents of the same event or activity, such as salesman keeping track of all he does, and is to do, and with whom in relation to various customers, vendors, his travel expenses, his fellow salespeople and business management. Salesforce.com offers a proprietary model that offers some help, but not a wholly satisfactory solution.
It is often required that one return to and separately search multiple apps simply to retrieve, use and/or share information related to a single event or transaction or to a series of related events and transactions. Even where some logically related information may be stored in a single app, the constituent elements may not be associated. In other words, information that is logically linked and important for an individual or organization to easily access and analyze as linked information becomes balkanized in separate apps or is not linked, even when resident within a single app. Such information is difficult and time consuming to retrieve and to logically re-link in a useful manner. The memory of the user, coupled possibly with individual app search functions, may be the only way to resurrect and associate such information.
For example, even a one person business, such as a lone electrician, may find it helpful to utilize all of the above mentioned apps in relation to one job for one customer from a first call through later communications and meetings, to sending photos or videos of recommended lighting fixtures and their installation, receipt and recordal of customer approvals, expenses incurred, invoicing, payment and sharing of other documentation, like product operating and warranty documents. The next time the electrician gets a call from the same customer for a new job or repairs on the old job, it can be extremely helpful to readily have at hand in a logically organized fashion all of the information from the prior job. In the paper world, the electrician would manually search the customer file, as unsatisfactory as that might be, but in the internet world, he might have an even more difficult task to resurrect pertinent customer information, where the information was generated and electronically recorded “on the go” with one or more mobile devices using multiple web apps.
The inability for the user to easily create, communicate and manage information on a mobile device and to easily resurrect logically associated information is to the great detriment of the individual as well as to the group and, for example, to business management that is unable to timely track organizational activity or recognize important patterns, trends or the like available from the aggregate data, particularly aggregate data available for display, preferably in real time, in a visually informative way, so-called “data visualization.” Noted researchers and statisticians, such as Hans Rosling, have demonstrated the extraordinary usefulness of the now well-known techniques of data visualization in making sense out of voluminous and complex data, if the relevant data can be conveniently accessed.
The new, cloud based, mobile app world also offers new opportunities and poses new challenges for materially improving collective action among individuals that are geographically disbursed, yet able to easily communicate and share information through their mobile devices. Collective action is the pursuit of a goal or set of goals by more than one person. It is a term which has formulations and theories in many areas of the social sciences. Much of life, business and personal, inevitably involves collective action. Thus, improving the effectiveness of collective action is important to society.
Much of the science underlying collective action emanates from the work of noted economist, Ronald Coase (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase). Coase is a British-born American economist and Nobel laureate whose 1937 article “The Nature of the Firm” introduced the concept of transaction costs to explain the nature and limits of firms. In the article, Coase describes how the transaction costs of managing a group impose upper and lower limits on the effectiveness of the group. The lower limit is set where the transaction costs of managing the group are greater than the benefits of the group's goals. This is referred to as the Coasean floor. The upper limit is set where the added benefit of more members is not offset by the transaction cost of managing them or the group becomes so large and complex that they become unmanageable. This is referred to as the Coasean ceiling.
Generally speaking goals that are below the Coasean floor or above the Coasean ceiling “do not get done” or are imposed by governments which make subjective determinations about what goals are deserving, and pay for the transaction costs through tax revenue. These determinations may be influenced by political or other factors and may introduce an inefficiency or distortion with regard to the allocation of resources. The Coasean limits have significant consequences with regard to how society functions. Many worthwhile activities, some with profound consequences, are not undertaken due to the transaction costs involved in organizing and managing groups. In this regard, there are many non-business and semi-business activities beneficial to society where the only reward is personal satisfaction or recognition (status). Providing a low cost (both economic and convenient) platform for these groups to assemble, communicate, share information and otherwise efficiently engage in a manner that advances collective action can open up new areas of endeavor for self-creating and other groups to benefit themselves and society.
Incremental improvements in transaction costs and the consequent improvement in efficiency are consistently pursued by good management and may lower the Coasean floor and raise the Coasean ceiling. However, if transaction costs are reduced and information management improved by an order of magnitude or more, rather than incrementally, the effect is transformative, like a quantum leap. An effective collapse of the Coasean floor and removal of the Coasean ceiling brings within the scope of collective action activities and goals which cannot be practically attained through incremental improvement. There is an opportunity in the digital mobile world, yet unrealized, to materially lower the Coasean floor and materially raise the Coasean ceiling for collective action.
Among the factors important to effective collective action are accountability, i.e., knowing that pertinent records exist and that consequences may ensue from failing to do what should be done, and recognition, i.e., receiving credit for doing things that advance the collective goal, even if such things are not within a person's expected responsibilities, and even if they may demand significant effort or may not be in the self-interest of the individual, but are important to the team. Accountability is advanced by creating and retaining a trail of accountability, i.e., reliable, contemporaneously created records of an individual's pertinent activities easily accessible in real time to team leaders and other members of the team. Effective collective action also requires, among other things, timely communications between all or some members of the group, as appropriate to the situation, the timely sharing of information (including provision of aggregated and analyzed information for group management), and the easy accessibility of reference materials to all needing them in support of the group goals.